Opinion Contributor

Hold states accountable on schools

Education systems have every incentive to look better than their results, the author says. | AP Photo

By REP. JARED POLIS | 7/29/13 1:49 PM EDT

While I respect Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Chester Finn and Executive Vice President Michael Petrilli for their decades of work in education reform, in their recent article, “Education Reform a Test for GOP,” they grade the Republican Party on an overly generous curve. In neglecting the crucial role of the federal government as a disruptive force for school improvement, the authors aren’t just reciting conservative talking points – they’re ignoring extensive evidence to the contrary.

Take, for example, Humboldt Secondary School, located right outside House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline’s district in St. Paul, Minnesota. After being identified as one of the state’s persistently lowest achieving schools in January 2010, Humboldt Secondary School received a School Improvement Grant from the federal government. Humboldt chose the “transformation” model, opting toreplace half its staff, extend learning time for students, and set aside 50 minutes per day for teachers to collaborate in teams. In just three years, Humbolt’s graduation rate has increased from under 60 percent to 77 percent, and the school has seen a significant increase in reading and math proficiency rates.

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The leverage and resources the federal government provided were critical to Humboldt’s success. As principal Michael Sodomka explainedto me, “The School Improvement Grant not only provided significant resources to meet many unmet needs of my students, the grants requirements allowed me to put in place a number of key changes that have directly led to improved outcomes for my students.”

But Humboldt is just one success story. As a country, we have a long way to go to close persistent achievement gaps and ensure that every child has the tools he or she needs to succeed in college and in a career. It is time to take into account what we have learned from No Child Left Behind in the past decade and improve the federal accountability and school improvement system, rather than end it.

And Washington’s role is crucial. State and local education systems have every perverse incentive to make themselves look better than their results. No one wants to be the governor who closes down schools, even when these schools have failed students and families for generations. Instead, elected officials tend to neglect the lowest-performing schools out of fear of shaking up the system. Absent a federal referee, states would create accountability systems that mask failure and exaggerate success.

Even in states with successful track records in education reform, the federal government can provide leverage and cover for reform-minded superintendents who share a goal of achieving greater results. Without the kind of comprehensive accountability and improvement system included in Senate Education Committee Chairman Tom Harkin’s ESEA legislation or Ranking Member George Miller’s Democratic substitute amendment, the federal government effectively would be sending money straight into school district bureaucracies with no guaranteed consequences for continued failure.

Finn and Petrilli argue, “Though Democrats never admit it, Washington is clumsy at best, and wildly incompetent at worst, when it comes to improving schools from the shores of the Potomac.” And it’s true that if Washington were getting involved in the day-to-day operations of a school, it would be a disaster.

But that’s a strawman: I have not heard any of my Democratic colleagues argue for federal micromanagement. Instead, what the federal government needs to do is ensure that districts and states improve schools. We cannot take “we’ve always done it this way” as an answer and should leverage limited federal dollars to support successful local initiatives that disseminate and encourage best practices.

Like Finn and Petrilli, I am a strong proponent of successful education reform efforts at the state and local level. I’m proud that my home state of Colorado is a leader on this score, and passed SB 191, a bipartisan tenure reform and teacher evaluation bill, in 2010. But not all states are like Colorado, and even in Colorado, the federal dynamic of the Race for the Top competition was critical to passing our reforms. As we compete in an increasingly global economy, elected officials at all levels of government must focus on improving student achievement nationwide, not just in our own backyards.

Chairman Kline’s H.R. 5, the Student Success Act, would effectively remove the federal responsibility for ensuring that states and districts take an active role in turning around the lowest performing schools. This legislation would give states the ability to define down success, and therefore disguise learning gaps and persistently failing schools. While we should provide flexibility for turning around failing schools, we cannot allow districts and states the flexibility to do nothing year after year and consign an even larger segment of an entire generation of kids to poverty. And I fear that under the “Student Success Act,” we would be doing exactly that.